Multimedia streaming over heterogeneous digital networks is one of the fastest growing applications both in terms of traffic demands and in terms of market potential. Systems can include a server, multicasting a multi-media source (audio/video) to a number of clients. Such systems lack a mechanism to provide real-time multicasting where the decoding delay is the same for all users; but each user reconstructs the source at a possibly different distortion, level, depending on its own channel capacity.